Guidance

Ofsted Academy

Find Ofsted's training, learning and professional development publications.

Applies to England

Introduction to the Ofsted Academy

The Ofsted Academy is where all of Ofsted’s work to attract, retain, train and develop inspectors and administrative, professional and technical (APT) colleagues comes together.

The Ofsted Academy seeks to:

  • open up Ofsted to those we inspect and regulate, and pass on what we know: it will share excellent practice from within the sectors we inspect and regulate. We will become increasingly transparent about what we do by sharing our training in context and making our processes visible

  • invest in our people: increasing the expertise of our workforce as we seek to make the right judgements in each context, and further enhancing our training, learning and development to contribute to the consistency of our inspections

  • enable all inspectors and APT colleagues to engage in consistency and improvement: the Academy will support a learning culture with regular cycles of reflection and improvement. It will regularly and routinely gather colleagues’ feedback and insights to improve what we do

  • continue to build our culture: the Academy will help colleagues across Ofsted work together to embed our values and behaviours. It will reinforce our values of professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect

In doing all of this, we will embed the lessons from the Big Listen. We will make sure that day-to-day learning and development continue to run as effectively as they always have while we design and deliver the future together. What the Ofsted Academy offers will grow, change and evolve throughout 2024/25 and beyond.

All-inspector mental health training

In January 2024, we held a mental health awareness training webinar for all inspectors. This included:

  • an introduction from Sir Martyn Oliver, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector (HMCI)
  • sessions led by our national directors for education, and regulation and social care, Lee Owston and Yvette Stanley, and our Deputy Chief Operating Officer (Delivery) and senior well-being champion, Andrew Cook
  • a briefing from the Chief Executive of Mental Health First Aid England, Simon Blake OBE

Watch Ofsted’s all-inspector mental health awareness training

## Ofsted’s all-inspector mental health awareness training

Recordings of inspector training materials

Schools: explore our collection of training videos

Topics include:

  • well-being
  • inspecting attendance
  • taking account of a school’s context when inspecting

We’ve recently added videos from our autumn 2024 conference for school inspectors, including:

  • strong foundations – focusing on the importance of  foundational knowledge 
  • changes to ungraded inspections 
  • changes to ungraded inspections for lead inspectors

We are publishing these recordings for transparency. We will publish more recordings of training that we have given to our inspectors in the other areas we inspect and regulate.

Updates to this page

Published 5 November 2024
Last updated 17 December 2024 + show all updates
  1. We have published videos from our autumn 2024 conference for school inspectors. You can find the complete video directory for schools in the ‘Recordings of inspector training materials’ section.

  2. First published.

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